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From Vanity Fair to Emerald City: Baum's Debt to Bunyan

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chl.0.0497

1543-3374

J. Karl Franson,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

From Vanity Fair to Emerald City:Baum's Debt to Bunyan J. Karl Franson (bio) My interest in a possible "confluence of reminiscences" affecting the creation of L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) began (like the curiosity of Lowes regarding Coleridge's imaginative vision) with "a strange footprint caught sight of accidentally just off the beaten track" that became "an absorbing adventure along the ways which the imagination follows in dealing with its multifarious materials" (Lowes 180, 3). It was the beaten track itself, the Road of Yellow Brick, that led me to a major source of Baum's classic tale and ultimately a new perspective from which to read it.1 On the original map of Oz, Baum envisioned the road leading to the Emerald City in a straight line.2 It resembles the famous road to the Celestial City in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678, 1684), which is "straight as a Rule can make it" to enable pilgrims to stay on course.3 In addition, both roads are associated with the color yellow: the road through Oz is paved with yellow brick (27), and the road to the Celestial City becomes paved with gold inside the City itself (162).4 Additional similarities between the books convinced me that Baum's supposedly original tale is simply a recasting of Bunyan's. Doubtless Baum was familiar with Bunyan's book, the most famous allegorical journey in Western literature. The work of a creative genius, Progress is a colorful, imaginative, and suspenseful story often claimed, in past generations, by children although not written originally for them (Georgiou 31), and is thus a logical source of inspiration for Baum's book.5 No extensive inquiry has been made into what influenced or inspired Baum's story, even though a variety of sources have been suggested for several of Baum's other books.6 Greene and Martin propose that parts of Oz came from stories Baum had made up for his sons (10; see also Mannix 36-37). Perhaps warded off by the widely held view that Oz is a uniquely American fairy tale and hence original and experimental, commentators generally have ignored [End Page 91] the possibility that Dorothy's adventures might be modeled directly upon stories Baum had read.7 Baum himself acknowledged no direct literary influences, claiming that Oz was "pure inspiration . . . right out of the blue" from the Great Author Himself.8 His introduction to Oz alludes to European fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen but purports to be presenting a new kind of tale without the horrible and bloodcurdling incidents, the heartaches and nightmares of traditional tales.9 In the first published essay on Baum's book, Wagenknecht records his suspicion that the author used quite freely whatever suited his purposes from older literatures (UA 23), and that in Mother Goose in Prose (1897), Baum's fancy "plays about and transforms not things that he has seen but things that he has read about" (UA 19). Nye later expresses the same view, that the Oz books are far more derivative than even Baum realized (2). The Pilgrim's Progress, in particular, has come to the minds of many who have written about Oz, but none has recognized it as a direct Baum source.10 Nevertheless, strong empirical evidence that Baum relied heavily on Progress calls into question his own claim to having been inspired when composing Oz. His likely purpose in rewriting Bunyan gradually emerges as the extent and nature of his borrowing become apparent. A close comparison between Oz and Progress reveals that Baum drew heavily upon the earlier book for narrative structure, episodes, visual imagery, and diction. The nature of his appropriation suggests that it depends upon a vivid recollection of Progress rather than a direct copying of Bunyan's text. Baum combines parts 1 and 2 of Progress, the former depicting Christian's journey to the City, and the latter, the journey of his wife, Christiana, accompanied by their four boys and a friend named Mercy. He omits overtly religious elements, transporting the tale to the American prairie and to a mythical, secular Land of Oz. Also omitted are episodes...